A number of sex workers will claim that selling sex is a worthwhile profession because it heals people or provides much-needed intimacy. These claims can quickly become extraordinary – certain sex workers, usually those who brand themselves as “high-end” may claim they save marriages or satiate the urges of otherwise violent men… or even that they provide intimacy to stave off suicidal urges.
A client meeting with sex workers doesn’t appear to make them less violent or less depressed. Most violent offenders focus their attention either on people they know intimately or on easy targets who wider society doesn’t care about. If someone is violent and sees sex workers, they may attack a sex worker instead of their partner, but that isn’t lessening the amount of assault. Prostitutes aren’t scratching posts for violent men to enact their urges on like a poorly-behaved cat. People who seek to do harm won’t be satisfied with paying for consensual rough sex, they’ll want to harm sex workers just the same as they’d have harmed any civilian.
Part of the idea of framing sex workers as these “saviours” is to counter religious narratives that paint us as sinners, another part is that it works as marketing for some escorts to position themselves as sexy Freudian mommy therapists (secure that money however you can babe, no judgement), and then there’s the desire to counter the rhetoric that sex workers increase violence against women as a group.
Certain feminist groups (radfems with positions eerily similar to the SCUM manifesto, for example, but also less extreme subsets) believe that since many sex workers tolerate mistreatment to get paid, and as a consequence of us accepting a transaction for sex at all, that this normalizes objectifying women for the clients who see us. I do understand this as a fear. If every time clients saw sex workers, they became more and more dangerous, balancing the safety of sex workers and also the expectation not to contribute to that harm would be immensely difficult. The thing is, this idea doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The kinds of clients who would pay a person to be able to enact harm upon them which they know sex workers are only willing to tolerate because they desperately need the money… they were already objectifying.
We could spend a long time debunking all of the ways different groups think selling sex harms society, and why some hookers will grasp for any counter to that no matter how flimsy. I think it’s more interesting to move on from the group who are arguing that their work is vital in sheer self-defence and to wonder about the sex workers who genuinely think that their work is healing people.
I certainly wouldn’t claim I’m doing any healing work. I’m not helping clients to learn seduction or social cues around sex – if anything I tolerate a lot of bad behaviour that I absolutely wouldn’t tolerate in my personal life, like constant complaints about not wanting to use a condom or comments about my appearance that would be an absolute turn-off during a one-night stand and would have me stop the sex. Most of my clients pay me for sex and there’s nothing going on beyond the physical act and me faking enthusiasm.
However, some sex workers who can afford to lose clients and have a different base in the first place may be much more honest with their clients than I am. They might explain to a client what feels good and what doesn’t, might guide them as to how to speak about sexual topics and to ask permission or check in, all of which are valuable skills. Particularly for men who were never taught the basics of consent and sexual boundaries who are seeing women regularly, learning how to approach sex in certain social contexts is beneficial. I can agree that while most sex workers aren’t doing this kind of work, those that are could be described as providing a certain type of sexual education. The effectiveness of that education is undercut by the fact the client is still ultimately using the interaction for sexual satisfaction, but I don’t doubt it when some sex workers say they think they’ve benefited clients with these lessons.
The more extreme claims, that sex workers save men from suicide or depression by providing lonely men with intimacy… these are nonsense. Someone who is lonely and lacking romantic and sexual connection might seek out a sex worker, but they do so knowing that the intimacy is faked and that it would not be occurring organically. People suffering from this kind of loneliness aren’t just seeking out the physical act of sex, they’re craving genuine connection with other people. While they may achieve short-term satisfaction, I see no evidence that depressed clients have long-term better outcomes as a result of paying for sex and getting intimacy in that way.
While I don’t think the intent is to validate the idea that sex workers are deserving of violence, arguing that by seeing violent clients or emotionally abusive ones that we can fix them implies that we should be in proximity to men like that. If sex workers can supposedly heal whatever “sickness” drives violent men to do harm, that undercuts the movement to protect sex workers from these men. We have blacklists and whisper networks to warn each other about dangerous clients, but if our purpose is supposed to be fixing them then all of that falls apart. Violent people aren’t sick and in need of healing, they are acting on these impulses for a variety of reasons and intimacy with a random individual won’t fix that.
It’s convenient to imagine that all societal ills, like sexual violence or widespread mental health issues, can be fixed on an individual level. That isn’t the case. These issues need structural solutions from wealth redistribution to education to empowering communities to protect themselves via legislative change.
Sex workers are not sex therapists, and a sex therapist having a personal sexual relationship with their client would be inappropriate and cause conflicts of interest.
Ultimately, since sex workers can’t make violent or depressed men better, funnelling those men towards sex workers as clients means that we end up being treated as rape sponges for the rest of the population. I don’t want to encourage certain predators to target sex workers instead of civilians, I want to stop them from targeting anyone at all, and bullshitting about sex workers as these saviours only distracts from that goal.
Instead of arguing prostitution shouldn’t be stigmatized because selling sex helps to heal violent or depressed men, argue it shouldn’t be stigmatized because there’s fundamentally nothing wrong with selling sex.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 